Thursday, April 23, 2015

This flu is dragging on and on in my house too although Jerry is more engaged now so I see there is hope since he came down with it first. Our tree of knowledge often rules the day. I agree with all you say, Neil. I've kept following gorilla journalists like Tim Pool more and more, as they give a less biased snapshot of happenings. the snapshots, however, do not seem to keep the dragons at bay.

I have a couple of artists in mind to invite when we settle on a platform, or decide to stay put, whichever happens. One from the US midwest and the other from Uruguay. I know a couple of other folks who may or may not take up the invite but are really interesting.

On Thursday, April 23, 2015 at 3:12:03 AM UTC-4, archytas wrote:

I have to say this 'flu or whatever has made me feel my mind was under occupation. 'Blind Eagle' was a name we gave to illegally distilled whiskey back in the day Allan. It made you feel you were flying because it had made you blind.

Molly mentioned fun in a recent email and if we are going to establish a niche somewhere I'm game. This said, I've been thinking about "strategic conversations", mostly because I can't find them anywhere - sure there are blogs I can contribute to - but the strategic conversations don't even exist in the university circuit. Our media is currently full of the story that the EU is just letting refugees drown in the Mediterranean - yet no mention of the US - Cuba situation years back. There is nothing about our role in creating the refugees and that they way we do economics has no answers. Basically the media tells us less than we know in its news broadcasts in coverage that is clearly part of not solving problems. Some residual part of me wants something better - but I also want something that is not miserable and protection from the trolls - including those trolls who seek to prevent real discussion through making everything kitsch (like the media).

The notion we can change anything fascinates me, though I sense we need more fun to do this. One can dream in the Amazon that one is needed to keep the sky up. Genuine and phony shamans are as difficult to separate as morons and risk takers. One needs the perspective of a laugh.

From what I have seen there are far to many posers. Many writing books and still have no real idea of what is happening. I know a bit but nothing compared to my native american friends. Often times they see what I can not one of them jokingly called me a blind eagle.. I was put into the position i desperately needed to use what i knew to help keep my ex alive and get her through serious medical conditions. . Mostly helping her deal with pain and avoid some of the effects of major brain surgery. The surgeon and I talked for hours and liked the results.. we became good friends. We were able to avoid excessive use of drugs. Which was good for her recovery. . It had many strange effects. . One of them is she hated me for keeping her alive.. I don't mind helping someone but I have no desire to control anyone.. fortunately people do not pay attention because there is a lot of natural spiritual energy involved and they never really learn to guide it.. good thing actually because there are places it is better not to tread. For me it was fascinating journey it verified what I was told. To journey with a true shaman can be an fantastic experience. But only if they want to take you. I was fortunate because i did voluntary work in their close proximity and we liked each other.. they bailed me out with the bishop when I stepped out of his guidelines. They where a group if characters what surprised me when around me there was an amazing was the inter tribal cooperation .. because thety told me how they did the samething. And of course they were all right.. but it was fascinating. . Even for them i think.. sometimes they knew each other from different planes.

There is no fear or danger in the shaman's journey, although the people that they help or "journey with" may be filled with fear, and so feel danger. Ultimately, during a journey into the soul, you can only be afraid of yourself. Although, like a bad acid trip, unstable personalities can unravel. Poser shamans might take advantage of others to claim "power" over them, but they aren't doing the authentic work of the shaman which is providing guidance for an inward journey and nothing more.

On Monday, April 20, 2015 at 8:02:47 PM UTC-4, archytas wrote:

I meant to respond to this earlier. Headaches stole the day! I've been reading work by a Yanomami shaman:

But the white people are other than us…. Their thought remains constantly attached

to their merchandise. They make it relentlessly and constantly desire new goods. But

they are probably not as wise as they think they are. I fear that this euphoria of

merchandise will have no end and that they will entangle themselves with it to the

point of chaos. They are already constantly killing each other for money in their

cities and fighting other people for minerals and oil they take from the ground. But

they do not seem concerned that they are making us all perish with the epidemic

fumes that escape from all these things. They do not think that they are spoiling the

earth and the sky and that they will never be able to recreate new ones (p.281).

take care of it, for if it becomes sick, everything will come to an end" (p. 410).

"I often listen to the words of my spirits who angrily ask themselves: Why are the white people so hostile to us?

Why do they want us to die? What do they have against us who do not mistreat them? Is it

simply because we are other people, inhabitants of the forest?" (p. 408).

Some guy born in the rain forest varies in semantics yet knows much the same as us. I'm not keen on the supernatural as I tend to think freedom is being free of arbitrary power decisions - so listening to one's soul is cute a metaphor, but also very dangerous for me - and falling out over words that are so ambiguous in the first place.

On Sunday, April 19, 2015 at 5:26:51 PM UTC+1, Molly wrote:

No doubt we confuse our terms and semantic levels of meaning. I don't think any of that changes the mechanisms of thought, feeling and physical function in our lives. It only changes our view of our lives, that includes our beliefs, concepts, philosophies, systems including health, political and economic. Propaganda is nourished in the confusion.

On Sunday, April 19, 2015 at 12:09:59 PM UTC-4, archytas wrote:

Intellectual traditions tend to assume human powers in reason exist to restrain our baser instincts. This is largely an assumption about the classical soul, copied into Xtianity and Islam. We all have animalistic drives and passions, and Reason constrains these individually and as a polis (polis is the root of both polite and police). This Reason is a moral force. Lingering in this is a notion that our powers of creativity must be demonic. Hume, perhaps infamously, had it that 'reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions'. Reason cannot tell us what we should want, only how to get it. I am by no means sure of this argument, which I think conflates reason and deduction-induction-abduction. I am convinced we have bureaucratised reason as a way of concealing passion and spirit.

Our conception of rationality is incoherent, hardly a good start for any rational claims. Sometimes rationality is a means, sometimes it's an end; othertimes it has nothing to do with morality ('value-free') and then it is the essence of what is right and good. Princeton, at one time, ran a course in "value free ethics", particularly stupid given that science knows no such thing as pure thought and knows any human without emotion would be incapable of thought.

A long way back in time, we find Molly's spiritual and mystical techniques for achieving union with the divine as rationality. Our fellow travellers would be Greeks living in Italy - the Pythagoreans. In out time we have come to identify the soul, not with Reason but with everything that makes us unique, idiosyncratic or imaginative as pathetic romanticists in love with cosmological bureaucracy.

On Sunday, April 19, 2015 at 2:04:09 PM UTC+1, archytas wrote:

Clarity is a strange business. The language of being clear, resembling being bleached or de-loused in Scientology, dominates much of social research in needing to be pre-suppositionless, not to contaminate the research situation and hundreds of other terms such as 'hermeneutics guarantees truth'. This is all to be done by 'objects' that carry more other organisms around with them than cells with their own DNA.

Screws change directions on boats. This may be what saves the boat from ending-up on the rocks.

On Sunday, April 19, 2015 at 1:14:04 PM UTC+1, Allan Heretic wrote:

Okay no soul just the eternal mind. . Sorry I screwed things up for you Neil what was this beginning of clarity?

I'm not suggesting any of us are Scientologists in any direct sense. Though when we talk of rationality, clarity and other impossible ideal-types forgetting they are ideals, we share something with such lunacy. Of course, it isn't long before Allan screws up any chance of clarity, saving ourselves from ourselves with his up-the-sleeve soul forever-undefined-curing-all.

I rather liked the idea that whatever we did was accessible to other people, whatever 'condition' they were in.

On Sunday, April 19, 2015 at 12:12:41 PM UTC+1, Molly wrote:

I suppose that's where the "father, forgive them for they know not what they do" advise comes in Neil. Even with people motivated by criminal intent, they don't really understand the magnificence of the life they've been given and how they squander it. I grew weary of letting the ills of humanity upset me log ago and have mostly let go of it, although occasionally fall back into dismay over it. That dismay interferes with my reverent feelings for life's wonders, so, eventually, I can again see the wisdom in letting go.

And even though, when in the throes of a virus, it is hard to remember the wonder, I do manage to find it every day. Even in a post that says "human society has little in it I would choose," because it allows me a kindred spirit. There is more to life than what human society holds and although at times it is difficult to see deeper or beyond, once done, it also seems so simple to do.

On Sunday, April 19, 2015 at 3:30:16 AM UTC-4, Allan Heretic wrote:

Time is still a question.. but i do see an interconnection.. and also Molly's friends.. RP sent me an email saying he wants back in.

I have friends who were involved with scientology. . They do a lot of brain washing. And bad creating lots of problems .. from what the movie was saying is time is a perspective .. it seems to be a series of markers of the past ~ present .

The present moment is elusive as as as soon as you read this it is already past.. as for the soul how does time interconnect with economics? That is your speciality. . I always thought that when you look at from different perspectives (booooo!) it helps in expanding and enlighting the concepts escaping from the lectures. . The effect if time on present day economic practice.. perfect for perspective time snapshots..

Allan's brief mention of time, before scuttling back into his soul-shell, might have something in it. There is only so much time one can lend to various ventures. I have developed an interest in the more honest creatures of this earth and find it easy to put time in there. I have been led (I hope led) to a view that human society is severely disabled and has little in it I would choose.

"Scientology" is both a criminal organisation (an interesting in that we struggle to treat it as such) and a glaring example of wider, crude religious practices everywhere. I fancy what most people have assumed to be rationality over the years is, in fact, something similarly crude and more of medieval time than anything modern.

We should upsticks Molly.

On Sunday, April 19, 2015 at 12:13:45 AM UTC+1, Molly wrote:

Scientology is one of those deadly Kool Aid cults with an enormous amount of money behind the effort. It took a small bit of Hermetic philosophy, as old as written history, added methods of control and brainwashing, threw in shunning and voila, you have something worth grabbing your children and your assets and running at least a thousand miles to get away from (Katie Holmes.

Having its roots in Hermetic philosophy legitimizes it to its constituents because these same concepts have been echoed throughout the ages.

Not sure where you stand on the concept of soul, Neil. My biggest worry for this group is that it is wobbling on a failing platform that leaves it open to wackos and trolls. this makes it hard for a small group dialogue to survive. Maybe it is too boring without a bundle of alters of one deeply disturbed person constantly arguing with themselves.

On Saturday, April 18, 2015 at 4:07:54 PM UTC-4, archytas wrote:

It's not really surprising time in this group has been so medieval. Rationality has been conflated with morality, thinking with spirituality (very Descartes) and legitimation with the supernatural. Some of the action hasn't been that distanced from Scientology.

On Saturday, April 18, 2015 at 4:29:21 PM UTC+1, Allan Heretic wrote:

Love always creats a special bond between souls.. you an I both know souls are eternal she is doing what she needs. All I can say is for her to follow her soul.. the soul can find the path if given a chance.

I have a dear friend whose husband languishes in the hospital right now in his last days on earth. She holds his hand and wonders, as we all do during times like these, about the "time" we are given in this life with those we love. Sometimes, it seems to be cut too short and I have to wonder if this isn't the workings of soul, as we are connected there eternally to those we love most.

Sounds really deep Tony - maybe we should leave it buried? Reality has taken a leap forward with Allan recognising a book plug as a book plug. Soon he will be able to tell us a blue book is blue (which it isn't). We don't know there is a reality. There is a reality hypothesis.

Get real people!

On Friday, April 17, 2015 at 5:33:19 PM UTC+1, facilitator wrote:

Time is an abstraction, a non quantifiable human invention used for measurement. Said more simply, it is not the substance but the flask. Outside of human conjecture time does not exist.

On Friday, April 17, 2015 at 12:25:25 PM UTC-4, Allan Heretic wrote:

I did watch the movie. Interesting reminded me of a book promotion. . And we actually have heard the same logic from RP using a Hindu God.. did not agree with that argument either. In the end there was a promotion for his book.

He gets into a lot of Einstein concepts on time.. listening to him and the other program. Time is evasive and a matter of perspective. A perspective unique to each person. . The one thing apparently physics can not prove is the exsistance if time. . Unlike the conclusions people these people want to jump to.. It would seem to me that all our souls are responsible for is the perspective known by the unique soul inside the reality of non-time ¿known? to exist within the reality of time..